constructed on what a sailor would call beautiful lines, and eminently
fitted for sea service. Many such vessels may be found depicted on the
celebrated Bayeux tapestry; and the peculiar position of the rudder
explains the treaty mentioned in the Heimskringla, giving to Norway all
lands lying west of Scotland between which and the mainland a vessel
could pass with her rudder shipped.... This was not one of the very
largest ships, for some of them had thirty oars on each side, and
vessels carrying from twenty to twenty-five were not uncommon. The
largest of these were called Dragons, and other sizes were known as
Serpents or Cranes. The ship itself was often so built as to represent
the name it bore: the dragon, for instance, was a long low vessel, with
the gilded head of a dragon at the bow, and the gilded tail at the
stern; the moving oars at the side might represent the legs of the
imaginary creature, the row of shining red and white shields that were
hung over the gunwale looked like the monster's scales, and the sails
striped with red and blue might suggest his wings. The ship preserved at
Christiania is described as having had but a single mast, set into a
block of wood so large that it is said no such block could now be cut in
Norway. Probably the sail was much like those still carried by large
open boats in that country,--a single square on a mast forty feet
long.[194] These masts have no standing rigging, and are taken down when
not in use; and this was probably the practice of the Vikings."

[Footnote 194: Perhaps it may have been a square-headed lug,
like those of the Deal galley-punts; see Leslie's _Old Sea
Wings, Ways, and Words, in the Days of Oak and Hemp_, London,
1890, p. 21.]

[Sidenote: The climate of Greenland.]

In such vessels, well stocked with food and weapons, the Northmen were
accustomed to spend many weeks together on the sea, now and then
touching land. In such vessels they made their way to Algiers and
Constantinople, to the White Sea, to Baffin's Bay. It is not, therefore,
their voyage to Greenland that seems strange, but it is their success in
founding a colony which could last for more than four centuries in that
inhospitable climate. The question is sometimes asked whether the
climate of Greenland may not have undergone some change within the last
thousand years.[195] If there has been any change, it must have been
very slight; such as, perhaps, a s